You might think that all of the normal cells in your body are cooperating with each other. Not counting microbial infections, the occasional carcinogenic defection from the target morphology, mutant cells in your normal brain, or your baby’s cells that colonized you, it might seem that the vast majority of your own cells should be incentivized to cooperate with each other because they share the same genome.
It turns out that this is not the case, and despite their identical genomes, your body is home to cells, tissues, and organs that have not forgotten their roots as individual agents that compete for resources – both metabolic and informational. But I think there’s more to this. Our computational work suggests that evolution sets up artificial scarcity within the body, in order to achieve robust embryogenesis, which may have implications for other large-scale systems composed of agential parts (discussed at the very end of this post).
The concept of competition between organs during development was first outlined in detail in a classic but little-known work by the great developmental biologist Wilhelm Roux called “The Struggle of the Parts” (now finally translated from the German, by David Haig and Richard Bondi).
{MORE}
https://thoughtforms.life/the-struggle-of-the-parts-how-competition-among-organs-in-the-body-contributes-to-morphogenetic-robustness/